Month: December 2013

I’m happy to report that since my previous post, I am now able to build the iOS app without any difficulty. Thanks again to James Montemagno at Xamarin for his help.

BTW: My apologies for the 4-day gap between posting on the issue. I was out of town and didn’t have my Mac with me so couldn’t do the iOS part of the build.

The reason I encountered errors & warnings when building the iOS project is due to the fact that when the wizard generates the project it does not fill in 3 key fields in the project properties: Application Name, Identifier, and Version. The fields are all blank as shown here.

Near the end of the documentation it does mention that one can edit the plist file using property pages. However, the screen shot shows the Identifier and Version fields empty giving one the impression that leaving them blank is OK.

With those values being so important, I would’ve preferred that Xamarin did one of the following (listed in my order of preference).

Prompt for the values in the project wizard

Default the fields to some reasonable value

In fairness, the error/warning messages do indicate that the values need to be set on the property page. It’s just that after the other headaches I was experiencing, seeing an untouched, wizard-generated project fail to build left me a bit discouraged.

IMHO – When working with a brand new environment, its critical that what comes out of the wizard must build without any errors. So often all one is trying to do is verify that the pieces are working and build errors on untouched wizard-generated projects give one the impression that something is wrong. 🙂

Build Success/Failure

One little thing that surprised me is that Visual Studio is not updating the status bar to indicate that a successful build has completed. In the case of a standard Visual Studio project, the status bar displays a message like the following indicating build success.

In the case of my VS solution containing the iPhone project, the status bar does not update with a success message as you can see here.

I’ve had to have the Output window open so that I can see when a successful build completes.

Although I haven’t tried to exhaustively diagnose the cause, the lack of a success message appears to be tied to the fact that the solution contains an iPhone project (Xamarin will often display the Mac build host IP Address in the status bar). When I create a solution containing only an Android project, the build result displays in the status bar as expected.

Xamarin.Android Beta Issue

Just to follow up on the issue I mentioned in my last post about the Xamarin.Android Beta breaking Xamarin.iOS in Visual Studio.

The folks at Xamarin have followed up and let me know that there is an incompatibility between the Xamarin.Android version that is currently in Beta and the production release of Xamarin.iOS. To safely install the Xamarin.Android Beta, I’ll need to install the corresponding Xamarin.iOS Beta … A very reasonable requirement.

I now have everything setup and running. I must admit that creating my first Android and iOS projects was not as a satisfying has I had hoped. There’s a bit of flaky behavior in the Android UI designer and the wizard generated projects for both Android and iOS have problems.

Let’s look at the Android side of things first.

Android Designer

The initial problems I ran into were tied to unexpected UI designer behavior I encountered when it was first opened.

The “Alternative Layouts” button, which is a really cool feature that lets one manage different device layouts more easily, didn’t work at all. Clicking on it did nothing.

The other buttons across the top allow one to manage the UI layout in different environments. As you can see some of those buttons are too small for their labels. There also some missing.

I was expecting buttons on the bottom-left of the designer to allow me to toggle between the design-view and the XML-view but they aren’t there.

Finally the label of the button on the device design-surface is showing the name of the string resource ‘@string/Hello’. It should be displaying the actual value.

The first two issues are easily resolved by simply taking some action that causes the design window to resize: explicitly resizing it, hiding/showing the toolbox, etc.

It turns out that the design-view/XML-view toggle buttons are not supported for VS2013 in the current stable release of Xamarin.Android (4.10.1), although they are supported in earlier VS versions and in Xamarin Studio (Xamarin’s stand-alone IDE). I checked around and found that the beta version of Xamarin.Android 4.10.2 does include support for the toggle buttons so I decided to install the beta.

When I installed the beta, it did indeed add the toggle buttons. It also fixed the first two issues I mentioned BUT …

… it completely broke iOS support in Visual Studio 2013 (we need to keep in mind that Xamarin.Android 4.10.2 is still in beta). I could no longer open or create iOS projects (remember it’s Android support that I updated). Unfortunately reinstalling Xamarin.IOS did not fix it. I ultimately had to completely uninstall all of Xamarin then reinstall from scratch and live without the toggle buttons for now.

Android Project

Moving on from the Android UI designer for a moment, I also ran into problems with the wizard-generated Android project in that it’s naming the Android resource folders incorrectly.

Notice that the folders under Resources (Drawable, Layout, Values) are all capitalized. That’s not supposed to be the case [ excuse the pun 🙂 ]. The Android platform doesn’t like that. Those are supposed to be all lower-case. I had to go through and manually rename them. Not ideal but not the end of the world.

BTW: Fixing those folder names had a nice side effect: It resolved the problem with the string resources. With those names fixed, the string resource values now display correctly on the device design surface (thanks to James Montemagno at Xamarin for his help on this one).

You can follow the steps I went through working things out on the Xamarin Forum.

iPhone Project

After working through all the Android stuff I setup all of the iOS pieces which include setting up a Mac as a build server. The setup process went pretty smoothly. I then ran the wizard to generate an iPhone Hello World app, did a build and immediately got 2 build errors and 1 build warning.

And with that I’m calling it a day.

I must admit, I expected an unchanged, wizard-generated project to be error free. 🙂

Keeping Perspective

To not blow things out of proportion, we want to keep in mind that none of the issues I’ve mentioned are show-stopping. They’re basically annoyances and all fairly easily worked around.

We don’t want to lose sight of the fact that Xamarin is solving a very hard problem. Android and iOS are incredibly different platforms with many of their own nuances and complexities. Then on top of that, Xamarin has to integrate into Visual Studio (a complex IDE) and interact with the iOS toolset running on a Mac. Many, many challenges to overcome.

Final Thoughts

Working in a brand new environment is always a bit stressful. For me, the best way to have that stressed relieved is for the environment to all work smoothly which didn’t quite happen in this case. That said, I have a workable environment and although I do need to apply some workarounds, they are all fairly easy to deal with.